I just whipped up a spreadsheet.2^128 is enough IP addresses to give 2.68*10^15 addresses to every square millimeter of surface area of every planet in the solar system, plus the moon, Charon, and the Galilean Jovian satellites.

That should last a while. But I'm all for overkill. I was glad when Maxtor finally punted and made BigDrive able to address a BIG ASSED address space; if you're redefining a standard, no point in just doubling it or even *16; go big!

Heck, RFID tags are just the first step. Next thing will be miniature wireless computers in every soft-drink can. And with the onboard GPS equipment, we'll be able to track every soda can out there, whether it's at the factory, in the trash, or floating around in space [byzantinec...ations.com]...

The 6bone [6bone.net] has been running for quite a while with MANY networks attached. Infact it is not shutting down for full IPv6 service on the internet.

I hope the DOD isn't building a network larger than this, why the heck would they waste the money on millions of machines that would be needed to be larger than the 6bone was. I can see claims that it is the largest single entity deployment of IPv6 - now that would be a useful claim

Also, I imagine the reason the DoD is building their own network right now, is so that they have more control over it. They don't need home users bringing havoc over the network while they are conducting their tests. It may also be a temporary network, and they could have further plans down the road to introduce further major changes to it.

I'm not sure if IPv5 really existed using that name, and if it did, it only existed at an experimental level. After some quick "googling", it seems "IPv5" was the real-time streaming protocol using version number 5 and running alongside IP, having some parts in common. Some people might have called it "IPv5", and "IPv6" was probably chosen to avoid confusion with this one. Here's more info about the protocol:

Be it the cause, or just fall-out, I don't see NAT's disapearing. In fact, I see quite the opposite. Now that protocols or firewalls are getting smarter with NAT, I can see a lot less need for public address space.

And before someone mentions their cell phones, exactly who plans on hosting services from their phones anyways?

Implementing Phone based IPv4 private IP's is just as difficult as implementing IPv6 public IP's. Each phone will have a MAC, and you will have a DHCP-like mechanism to establish an ip/route/subnet, etc..

The only difference is that you can't host services on your phone that are internet addressable. Darn.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be fun to/. a phone? I can imagine some poor geek walking down the hallway, and suddenly his phone explodes in his pockey 'cause someone put up a link to it labeled as "Quake4 test" or something...

NATs will definately proliferate. All it's going to take is some worm shutting down all the refridgerators it can connect to, including both home, commercial, and warehouse coolers.

If you wanted a more dangerous scenario, there's the toilet flushing possibility. City water pressure drops, and an entire region hits a water shortage. Sewage treatment plants overflow, and thousands of gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the local water supply.

Realistically, who wants to risk their phones being hacked, DOSed, hijacked, wormed, virused, etc? How do you expect to block tele-marketers that can use dynamic IP's across the planet to connect to you? There are so many reasons that this

Get this through your head:NAT != firewall
In case you missed that, let me say it again:NAT != firewall

NAT was not designed for security. It was designed to delay the end of the world until IPv6 could come and save it (OK, that's a bit of a parabole...sue me).

Firewalls are just as (in-)effective in a NAT-free environment. NAT is just as (in-)effective in a firewall-free environment. By exchanging NAT for IPv6, you aren't "giving up" any functionality, you're gaining it, and giving up a nasty kludge that never should have been invented.

My point wes to exemplify the fact that a phone or doesn't need to host services to THE INTERNET. They could contain dozens of useful services, but I don't see direct contact to the device as a requirement.

A hosted service like IM can be accomplished by the phone or watch making an outbound connection, but there'll be no hard-fast requirement for the wristwatch to host an internet addressible service EVER!/* 50 years later, Aww Crap! */

would probably not notice or care if they're behind a NAT. Then the few that do could use the remaining IPs. We don't have a shortage now - not even close - unless you count the artificial shortage created by leaving several class A's in the hands of old universities and businesses.

Shortage, perhaps not, however why do I have to pay more for more than 5 static IPs with SBC? Why does another local SDSL provider (Arrival.net) charge $5/month/ip? If there was no shortage, and some ISPs were just giving away addresses like it was nothing, then I would say it wasn't a problem. Right now, the problem is that there is a finite amount of addresses, so ISPs will only give out as many as you can justify, as they have to justify them to ARIN/RIPE/APNIC.

An ideal solution would allow you to have control of the port forwarding, yeah. Like, a CGI at the ISP that would allow you to temporarily forward a port to your own port. In fact that'd probably be easier to manage (for most Windows folks say) than serial'ing in to their NAT router.

The fact is there are ways to make it work, that will cost a lot less to develop and deploy than the mass-migration to IPv6.

There may well be other great reasons to move to IPv6 - but the so-called IP shortage is not one of th

In contrast, the IPv6 address length is '128 bits, or 340 billion billion billion billion unique addresses.' Experts hope this will solve a predicted IP address shortage as more devices are created to use the Internet."

IPv6 has a large enough address space to give every atom in the known universe its own IP address, and then some.

Try squaring that number and you'll be closer.

However, 340 undecillion addresses will be enough for anything we could possibly do here on earth, unless of course 339,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,000,000,000 of those addresses are reserved for Class AAAAAAAAAA networks.

I don't think you quite understand the scale of what we're dealing with here. IIRC, IPv6 has a large enough address space to give every atom in the known universe its own IP address, and then some.

I don't think YOU quite understand the lessons to be learned from the past. Just as two-digit years and 640K turned out to be insufficient, this newly expanded address space will fail as well. There is already research underway [mit.edu] to WiFi-enable individual subatomic particles. Try taking off your blinders and

That's like "hoping" that a 100megaton nuclear weapon will dislodge the stubborn tree stump near the driveway. I think it'll work.

From the opposite angle, it's like the engineers on the Manhattan Project who were "pretty confident" that it wouldn't start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire earth.

I love it when engineers consider their margin or error small enough to justify risking wiping out all life on the planet. You can just imagine the apology, "Oh bugger! I'm most terribly embarrassed. I

- It's eight five six charlie zero fox alpha three niner zero six file nine charlie fox fox nine charlie zero six three two zero one one zero zero one alpha one two four eight five six charlie...

- I am sorry, can you start over?

- IT's eight five six charlie zero fox alpha three niner zero six file nine charlie fox fox nine charlie zero six three two zero one one zero zero one alpha one two four eight five six charlie zero fox alpha three niner zero six file nine charlie fox fox nine charlie zero six three two zero one one zero zero one alpha one two four.

As far as I know, they are not going to be dividing up the addresses into classes like before. There will be specific size blocks like a/32 or a/48 that users will get. But only the tier-1 one ISPs will actually be assigned blocks from the regional authorities. Everyone else will just request certain size blocks from their direct provider. All of the details are discussed in the RFCs.

One of the principle design goals of IPv6 was to simplify the workload for routers. IPv6 achieves this in a number of ways:

1. Part of the reason that IP addresses are so long is that part of the address space is being used for an improved addressing hierarchy. In turn, this will allow routers to maintain much shorter routing tables.2. IPv6 routers not longer fragment IP datagrams3. IP Header checksums are been removed

As many people have noted, the IPv6 addressing structure supports a much larger number of IP addresses. Experts are predicting that the number of IP addresses required are going to increase enormously in a relatively short amount of time. Most people are familiar with cell phone adoption rates and the impact on IP address assignment. Potentially a more interesting example is the impact of new PC bus architectures on networking models. Intel has announced a new bus architecture titled PC-Express. What makes PC Expressing interesting is that it applies a data networking model to the PC bus. [Thinking addresses, flow control, retransmissions, etc] Where this gets interesting is that PC Express can be scaled from the level of a PC bus up to an enterprise class switching fabric. Once this gets widely deployed, there is no reason why the processor on one system could not control the video card on another. We are rapidly migrating to a model in which all sorts of peripherals - processors, sound cards, hard drives - will need to be configured with their own IP addresses.

IPv6 provides much better support for autoconfiguration. This is critically important for the consumer electronics manufacturers in the Asia/Pacific.

IPv6 requires IPSec, so we might finally get pervasive network layer security. I'll be very happy to get rid of abominations like "SSL VPNs".

Okay, I understand and agree with most of your post. But how is getting rid of the IP header checksums a good thing?

Error detection and/or correction is generally already being done at the link layer.

If each physical network hop has reliable transfer, a header checksum is really only useful if something along the way corrupts the packet during forwarding. (One could probably argue that receiving and processing such corrupted packets should expose the corruption problem more quickly than rejecting them.)

Does anybody know why TPTB decided on 128 bits for IPv6? 64 would have been more than enough. IP addressing is not like memory or disk space, where you can envisage ever-increasing requirements. It's an addressing scheme for devices. 64-bit addresses are big enough to have nearly a billion uniquely addressable devices for every human being on Earth. Why isn't that enough, even allowing for some spare bits to make address-assignment easier? Do you plan to ask for a billion addresses for the billion devices you plan to attach to the Internet?

Probably so that in 25 years, they don't have to revisit it again and implement an IPv8. Also, the design of IPv6 is very different than IPv4. The 128 bits are actually two distinct 64bit identifiers combined together. The first 64 bits indicates the subnet. Of that first 64 bits, 48 are there to be used in partitioning the network in different ways (it's an oversimplification I know and I am dumbing down some details). The last 64 bits are your 'interface identifier', this is the equivalent of your 48bit MAC address. Only now the MAC address is going to be part of your address.

Ease of routing is the reason. With 64 bits you have to be careful how many IPs you give to each ISP. If you give too few you have to renumber or add disjoint addresses, polluting the routing table. If you give too many, you could still run out. You would also give just a few addresses to end users, say 256. That makes it impossible to do proper routing at the customer end, and addresses still have to be carefully assigned by hand or by DHCP. With 128 bits you can afford to embed the MAC address in the IP address, guaranteeing that it is unique. Goodbye to (stateful) DHCP.

The reason is that 64 bits are used for the network part and the remaining 64 bits -- automatically derived from the interface MAC address -- comprise the host part. This allows stateless autoconfiguration, which makes IPv6 networks easier to administer.

Experts hope this will solve a predicted IP address shortage as more devices are created to use the Internet.

This falls into the general category "Death of Internet Predicted". The internet is not running out of IPv4 addresses at the rate predicted in the early '90s, for a number of reasons, including NAT (whether you like it or hate it) and the simple fact that not everyone who wants to browse the web needs a publicly routable address.

Much better reasons for adopting IPv6 is that autoconfiguration is to a large degree built into the protocol (including its associated ICMP messages) and doesn't have to be done by a separate mechanism like DHCP. Also, IPv6 has a fixed length, small packet header, which should make it easier to do all sorts of routing tasks.

If you're running a Linux or BSD kernel, check out one of the many 6to4 tunnel brokers to get onto the 6bone or your own friendly neighborhood IPv6 backbone.

Either that, or most software will finally learn to adapt to either 2 ways: 1) Automatically learn your IP, or the most likely way 2) Use DNS hostnames.
Instead of relying on only IP addresses, most software will simply use a gethostbyname( ) method to automatically learn the IP address.

Also, you need the decimal point or other seperator to completely specify the address. When typing, you either need to show the seperator or hit enter or tab or something to get the next field. Therefore, the actual IPv4 is 12 digits + 3 spacers as opposed to 40 digits + 7 spacers. This is over three times as much, and worse it is much harder to remember 8 things (7 plus 2 is the oft-quoted memory capacity).

There are a lot of good reasons for everyone to upgrade. There is a good article over at CommsWorld [commsworld.com.au] about this. Basically the main reason for upgrading is innovation. Once everyone can attach a public IP address to all of their devices, there will be a lot of cool stuff that will come out.

(Note: the article was originally linked to from CircleID [circleid.com])

Oh, goody - so the world can do to our fridges, treos and tivos what they're already doing to too many of the public IP devices.

And I can't wait til I have to keep track of a few dotted quad-quad-quad-quads (?) or every time the router needs poking with a stick. AH! I've just been handed a note - that IPv6 addresses will be shortened - from 16 three-digit decimal numbers to - WHAT? 8 four digit hex numbers? Ah! Much much better!

And of course if all these addresses are public (aka static) then for eac

Yes, I read somewhere the average routing table sizes for an IPv6 router will shrink to about 8000 entries, as compared to the 50,000 or so that they have to maintain today. Not sure if it will really speed up the nodal processing delays by factor of 5x or 6x though.

As IPv6 will require some upgrades on internet infrastructure that you don't want to do too oftne, the team that designed it took the opportunity to fix and improve several parts of IPv4, where the well-known address space improvement is just one improvement in maybe a dozen. It's a bit unfortunate that this is the only change talked about, when the protocol offers so much more. I checked Wikipedia, and that one also just listed the address space changes.

I think there is a good chance that IP spoofing will be reduced in IPv6. Because of the hierarchial design of IPv6, I think that most ISPs will probably configure their near-edge/gateway routers to drop any packets that have source addresses not within their respective network.

IPv6 should eliminate NATs. The people who enjoy the false security (prevention of inbound connections) that NAT provides will keep using them.

However, I see no reason for most people to use them. With this many IP addresses, there's no reason why every connection can't be given 255 (or more) IPs. For example, I connect with my cable modem. Where's the hurt in giving me 255 IPs to use? If this is the standard, filtering shouldn't be any problem. And say I've got 10 computers on a LAN. Rather than us

That is just one suggested way of assigning addresses. It is very popular though. Anyway, if an ISP does not give you enough address, you just tunnel somewhere that does. Lots of providers of tunnels already. If all else fails, I am sure you can find a friend that is close to you latency-wise who is willing to let you have 2^64 addresses out of the 2^80 he has...

IPv6 should eliminate NATs. The people who enjoy the false security (prevention of inbound connections) that NAT provides will keep using them.

Why do you call preventing inbound connections "false security"? And how is making every device in a home face the net a good thing?

I think limiting the net-facing presence is a good idea. I like the fact that I'm in exclusive control of my incoming traffic. Besides, I can't figure out why anyone else would want to talk to my coffee maker in the first place.

NAT without a properly configured firewall is basically a false sense of security, and is trivially easy to get around.

If you have a proper firewall in place to protect your machines, (i.e. block all unauthorised inbound and outbound ports) with NAT as well, then fine. But NAT is a one-to-many hack, not a security feature.

IPv6 will mean you won't have to use all the kludgy port forward hacks you do when using NAT, while still being able to protect machines properly with a firewall.

From the way he laid out the question i imagine he's talking theoretical, notice how the number is symetrical and all numbers right next to each other, it's like using the hostname asdf.com in an example

The address space exhaustion is here already. I cannot get any more IP addresses. I only get two, and I pay extra for the second. If I want more I need to switch away from cable modem to something more expensive.

Luckily I run IPv6 as well, and that gives me 2^80 addresses. It will probably be a while before I exhaust those.

It is true, the IPv4 address space is not as depleted or near exhaustion as many have made it out to be. However, that fact is hiding something else. The reason the IPv4 pool not been completely exhausted is the regional authorities are keeping a very tight fist on how many addresses are being given out. This is the same reason why most people cannot get more than one IP address from their ISP without paying extra. And the ISP's themselves are fighting for extra address space.

Devices like phones, PDAs, and (heaven forbid) toasters don't want to talk to NATs: they want to talk to the Internet. NATs represent a layer of transformation that is easy but not absolutely transparent.

Although NAT works for extendable, generic computing platforms, like your desktop, it is cumbersome to have simple devices that want to connect to the Internet have to worry if they are really connected or behind any number of NAT layers. After all how does your cellphone with its own SMTP/Web server tel

Yeah. I fell for a different link to the same page, and it popped up all of it's windows, so I jabbed F12 (I use Opera), and the pop-up blocker was set to Open requested pop-up windows only! I DO want to know HOW they do it, just I don't want to view source on THAT page!

I don't think thats very likely. Its much more likely that someone would be assigned their own subnet. That way everything you have will have its own ip address. Sure, thats all tinfoil hat stuff for most stuff but when you can traceroute6 to your keys to find its one hop from "couch" you'll wonder how you ever did without it.